Hans wrote in 7211:
>
>
>It is a too optimistic view to think that only internal
>contradictions are relevant for the downfall of capitalism.
And to change the subject:
Were only internal contradictions relevant for the downfall of
feudalism? Or did "trade" act as an external dissolvent? Dobb vs.
Sweezy, Brenner vs. Rudra.
I have been arguing that the setting up by modern slave plantations
under the aegis of merchant capitalism--and this was a revolutionary
undertaking in the sense that merchant capital did not simply latch
onto independent producers and formally subsume them but financed
enterprises organized around a large scale, cooperative and gang
organized labor process which forced proletarians in, say, Barbados
to be more productive than they were anywhere else--was a crucial
critical *external* dissolvent of feudalism in the fillip it provided
to several industries which could then entice away peasants and serfs
and thus accentuate the internal crisis of feudalism (Albritton
argues that the demand for wool from the putting out system also
acted as an external force for enclosures and the reorganization of
rural relations).
But... this raises the question of why slavery (sugar plantations in
particular) did not lead to full scale capitalist agriculture and
industry in Spain and Portugal as it did in Britain. Which then
leads to the conclusion that only where the internal contradictions
of feudalism were of such a nature could there have been a
transition to capitalism. So the primacy of internal contradictions
are reasserted in quite a reasonable manner by Brenner and Ellen
Wood, and I am thinking about a reply to this.
But a Marxist metaphysics about the primacy of internal contradiction
may bias the way in which Marxists understand the transition from
feudalism to capitalism. Plantation slavery may not have been
sufficient but it does not mean that it was not necessary in the
transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Rakesh